Modular;
2013

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Music from this release

A few months ago, when Young Dreams covered a song by former tourmates Tame Impala, they renamed it “Feels Like We Only Go Bachwards”. The pun spoke volumes. Young Dreams are baroque, a little anachronistic and, occasionally, wincingly earnest-- but at least their self-presentation shows that they’re fully aware of all these things. Everything about them has an air of almost orchestral grandeur. A Norwegian pop collective whose membership sometimes is as high as 12, their press material describes them not as a band but a “sovereign nation.” Their recent single, the floating, psych-pop anthem “Fog of War”, was a standard tale of alienation and teenage dreams, except for the fact that instead of pining for the girl next door, the narrator was “waiting for my own Athena.” Dream big or go home.

Young Dreams are from Bergen-- a city where, by their own admission “it rains 400 days a year”-- but sonically, Between Places imagines a place where the sun shines bright. Their densely flourished yet weightless pocket symphonies owe an obvious debt to the Beach Boys, but certain elements of their sound also nod to more contemporary artists: the buoyant vocal harmonies on “Footprints” recall Grizzly Bear circa Veckatimest, while “First Days of Something” centers around a breezy riff that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Vampire Weekend song. Still, Between Places has a thematic unity that makes it something more pointed than a collection of influences. Whether about escaping the oppression of adolescence or your dreary local weather patterns, Young Dreams’ music exalts the transformative power of imagination. “I think it's a reaction to the weather we have: freezing cold, no light,” the de facto frontman Matias Tellez said of their sun-dappled sound. “I think it's just that, when things are miserable, you start dreaming of things that aren't as miserable."

Between Places is certainly an impressive sounding album. Its best songs, like “Footprints” and the eponymous “Young Dreams” achieve a difficult balance of feeling grand and baroque but never overcrowded; woodwinds, synthesizers and choral background singers add a fullness to the atmosphere but duck out of frame right at the moment when they’d be too much. The hooks are unabashedly epic, and the atmosphere is immersive but light. The album’s high point, “Fog of War”, sounds like a Killers song coming apart in the outer reaches of the stratosphere.

But Young Dreams have to work some things out down on earth before they can effectively soar that high. Tellez’ lyrics often either too bland (“We’re restless, that’s why we keep on moving…We’ll live forever”) or, when he zooms in and attempts a bit more specifics, clumsy (“I couldn’t stop talking/ I now need a charger for my mobile phone”). This wouldn’t be such a problem if the songs weren’t structured and mixed as though the lead vocals were the most important things going on-- they haven’t yet mastered the trick that a band like Grizzly Bear do so well: presenting lead vocals as though they’re just another instrument in the song, and using lyrics more for texture than explicit meaning. The band’s songwriting chops are evident on Between Places, and it’s refreshing for a debut to err on the side of being too ambitious, when so many new indie bands nowadays suffer from the opposite problem. But the content of these songs doesn’t quite earn their epic execution. “Not empty, because of our young dreams,” Tellez professes on the closing track, but it’s the dreams themselves that feel hollow and faceless, the kind whose specifics you strain to remember the next day.